Research Interests

My research interests focus on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union during the twentieth century through the lens of urban history and nationality policies. My dissertation, “Creating a Tatar Capital: National, Cultural, and Linguistic Space in Kazan, 1920–1941,” combines both of these themes by using the city of Kazan, a cultural and industrial center on the Volga River and home to diverse ethnolinguistic and confessional communities, to probe the relationship between urban space and national practices in the two decades following the creation of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920, when the Bolsheviks’ political and social visions for Kazan reconfigured the physical and cultural landscape of the city. My research places national identity in conversation with the physical and cultural world around it, emphasizing the practices that helped to define group boundaries; this included, for example, determining where to speak Russian and Tatar, as well as learning how to coexist with other national groups in integrated university, factory, and communal apartment settings. I am also interested in the history of Russia’s Muslim minority groups more generally.